Choices

CHAPTER | 0

TWO YEARS AGO

Madhukar was panting, but he didn't stop. He knew he had to make his way far away from where he was or... he would be dead.

With bruised leg and torn clothes, he didn't know how much further he could skip until his father and his other friends reached him. In spite of being hit several times in all his life, Madhu never thought that his father would go to the extent of sucking blood from his own son.

His body ached, his mind ached and everything he felt ached. It was as if he was dying every day, both mentally and physically. The trauma was too much to bear and too much to hold on to. Hope was too expensive to even think and Madhukar didn't think that he would survive.

He stood by the coconut tree, gasping for air. Madhu wiped his eyes with the back of his hand only to find blood mixed with his tears.

This treatment wasn't new for him. It was an everyday routine and Madhu had been accustomed to it, but this time it had gone out of control. His father had come home, completely drunk but he still had the ability to stand tall and use a bamboo stick on him.

The bamboo stick had come home few years ago and was liberally used on him with no one to protect his sore back. Madhu had thought that his back would get accustomed to the thrashing that one day he would no longer feel the pain. But how wrong was he?

He had been shifted from his room to the cowshed to spend the night with the cows and the stray dogs shivering in the cold, praying that things would become easier for him. He had been nursing his latest wound with the cold cow dung on his red pulsing skin when his mother had come with a tearful face.

Though she never stopped her husband from physically abusing his son, Madhu knew that she cared more than she let on.

"Madhu," she cried, gently holding his leg for inspection. The leg, which was his father's first aim tonight, had swelled up to resemble a leg of an elephant. In the faint light of the moon, Madhu's mother saw the brutalized skin which was in the verge of turning purple.

"It's okay, Maa." Madhu consoled in clenched teeth, hoping that he didn't distress his mother more than he intended to. "I'm okay."

"You father... he has gone to fetch his friends, Madhu..." His mother cried again. "He wants to... he wants to..."

"He will not do anything to me, Maa." He said. The assurance went unheard by his mother who continued to wail for her husband's sins.

Madhu was certain that his father didn't have the nerve to do anything grave other than give him a few handful of bruises on him. Though he didn't know what he had done wrong, he had never once raised his hand on his father, scared that the ill treatment might start on his mother if he did.

"He wants to burn... burn this shed." The mother continued after having heard the news that her husband had given away in his drunken stupor. "Run away, Madhu... He's going to kill you... No! You are my baby!"

When Madhu had insisted that she was only talking because she was under the spell that she was guilty, his mother had turned angrier. With all her might, she had pulled her son to his feet, pushing him out of the shed and eventually out of her life... their lives before it was too late.

"Don't turn back, Madhu!" She pushed him to the streets. "Run!"

Madhu didn't understand if it was a gimmick to get him out of the house or because she was truly scared of her husband's antics. Either way, he knew that his time in the village was over.

Limping away in the dark, he tripped over a stone and stumbled on the hard ground face downwards. His already scraped knee split open and a gush of red liquid sputtered out, making him want to cry out in pain.